


Clustered Together

by akire_yta



Series: prompt ficlets [455]
Category: Leverage, Sense8 (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Other, cluster!AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-09 02:22:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11094900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akire_yta/pseuds/akire_yta
Summary: qwanderer on tumblr requested at my little sense8 wake: Leverage team as a cluster meet Avengers team as a cluster!





	1. Chapter 1

The first time Tony Stark feels it, he’s a fucked up teenager with rich kid daddy issues.

It’s official: written in all caps in the file on the computer his shrink thinks is secure.

So Tony doesn’t explain the sensation of cold that is permeating through his bones, doesn’t admit to a feeling deep in his chest of such a sense of loss that he wants to sob and rail and break shit and make shit and a thousand other logic conflicts that could rip him apart.

He just sits there in a silence the shrink thinks passes for patience, wrapped up in seven layers of wool and warmth and softness and tries not to shiver until their time is up and Tony can escape.

Aunt Peggy isn’t his aunt, but she takes him in anyway, and makes him tea with hands that shake from a different kind of cold.

The silence is warmer here.

* * *

The first time Natalia Romanov feels it, she’s not Natalia. She’s Sophia, a Bulgarian model trying her luck at some third rate fashion show in Lyon like it would get her one step closer to Paris.

The cover is easy; Natalia has known hunger before, in all its forms. Her mark buys her story, entices Sophia up to his room with promises of a hot dinner, a modeling contract.

She doesn’t let him get to ordering room service. His neck snaps with one sharp tug, the phone receiver dropping from his limp fingers to whisper the dial tone from the carpet.

Natalia turns, and it’s like walking into Siberia in winter – the cold hard enough to punch the air from her lungs. It’s gone as fast as it arrived, and Natalia has to flutter her eyes to be sure that snow isn’t clinging to her lashes.

* * *

Clint Barton is used to voices in his ear; echoes from before, a phantom limb in audio form.

You’ve got to see this…is it the pilot…my god…get the General

Clint rubbed a calloused hand over his hair, expertly flipping the tiny switch on his hearing aid.

God, he missed sound.

* * *

Bruce Banner is used to waking up in strange places feeling cold and alone and in danger.

The roof is corrugated iron, more rust than metal after years under tropical monsoons. As Bruce blinked, the dark tin acquired a ghostly echo, something bright and clean and neutrally medical.

Bruce closed his eyes as a pleasant woman’s voice, far away and barely audible, spoke with a faint accent. “You’re in a recovery room in New York.”

No. He was in Khulna. Someone here must have a working television.

Bruce pulled the light sheet over his head and fell back asleep.

* * *

Steve Rogers was three days out of the ice, the last of the drugs they had poured into his veins finally burning away when he woke to find strangers staring at him.

“What now, more tests?” he groaned, closing his eyes as he stretched his neck one way and the other.

When he opened his eyes, he was sitting on the edge of a cot in a beat-up, run-down shack made of driftwood and scraps. He startled to his feet in a surge of movement. “What is…?”

“This,” someone else’s voice finished his sentence. Steve span around; in the blink of an eye the shack changed to a sleek, futuristic workshop. Another blink, a bland hotel room. Blink, blink, blink, the scenery changed like a kaleidoscope.

The only constants were the other people; a dark haired man holding a spanner, another holding an arrow in his fist like a dagger. The woman next to him seemed braced to strike. “что это?” she said, but Steve heard “what is this?”

“This?” Steve wasn’t the only one to turn. The motion seemed to settle the scenery to a steel-grey room, windows dark with night. Before them stood a black man in a black coat with a black eyepatch covering one eye. His hands were folded behind his back, but Steve knew he was unsettled. “This is a goddamn pain in my ass right now.”


	2. Chapter 2

Tony was still getting used to the idea that he was also a _we._ He wanted to scream, but raging against this _clusterfuck_  of neurology felt like he was raging against himself, and he had enough experience in self-abuse to know how futile that ultimately was.

The girl was sitting on the edge of the workbench, her boots swinging idly as she watched him solder.  She wasn’t _there_ even as every sense he had was screaming she was – Tony had even smelled the faint scent of her soap as she had silently appeared and taken up watch.

The stink of solder was all he could smell now, but that couldn’t erase the feel of her watching him.  “Don’t you have…I don’t know…” There was this entire catalogue in his brain of things that belonged to other people, and Tony was resisting with all his might the way those memories seemed to want to bleed in and mingle with his own.  “Flowers to pick, or merry schoolyard songs to sing as you skip down some mountain path.”

He’d visited her, before; control was still elusive, for all that that asshole Fury said that it would come with practice and time.  But Fury was an asshole who appeared like the asshole fairy to dispense assholish advice before vanishing again up his own asshole, for all Tony knew.  And so Tony sometimes turned to find himself not in his tower, but amid stone buildings in some rural, mountain town that was charmingly pleasant, in a run-down, low-tech kind of way.

Not even clicking his heels seemed to work to send him home at will.

Wanda just smiled; she seemed to find him _amusing_.  “How young do you think I am?” And he knew, his ears were clear, that she wasn’t speaking English.

And yet that was what he heard.

“Too young to be near sharp pointy tools,” he muttered, snatching up a useful probe to poke at his solder work with.

“Am I annoying you?”  Tony gave her a look that made her laugh, bright and easy and slightly wicked.  “Very well, I will leave you to your poking.”  She winked and slid off the end of the bench, vanishing before her boots hit the ground.

“отродь,” he muttered, and then wondered where the strange collection of vowel-sounds came from.

“Language,” a voice purred from behind him.

Tony jumped hard enough to knock several tools off the bench.  “Jesus _christ_ , wear a fucking bell,” he yelled.

Natalia smiled like a snake, her eyes on the device, safe in its clamp.  “Signal blocker?”

Tony felt an unaccustomed flash of _shame_ , of being _caught_.  “Worth a shot,” he muttered.

The feeling of her hand picking up a pen in his fingers would never not feel strange. The number was long, international dialing.  “Sex line?” Tony quipped hopefully, rubbing his fingers.

Natalia patted his shoulder.  “Just in case this thing actually works, you should let us know.”  She sauntered towards the door.  “Hate to think you’d just accidentally blown yourself up instead.”

“I never blow myself up by accident,” he hollered after her.

Her laugh echoed in his ears long after she disappeared from view.

 * * *

Tony told himself he was checking out the room for competitors and supermodels, and not people no-one else could see.

It was a big party, glittering with shiny things and self-important people; his natural element.  Tony pressed the flesh, cracked jokes, posed for selfies with the baby nerds, talking big to the investors and coy to the journalists.

The party was roaring when someone he once knew grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him around.  Tony didn’t register the name, just nodded and shook hands with the tall kid who spoke with a Nigerian lilt.

“That accent is just embarrassing.”

Tony winced and turned it into a smile as Natalia shuffled through a gap in the crowd, un-selfconscious in her sweat pants and pulled out t-shirt as she perched on the back of the nearby sofa. Tucking one hand under his other arm, he tried to make a discreet shoo-ing gesture.

She ignored him.  “The kid is lying like a lying liar.  Trust me,” she added as Tony risked shooting her a glance.  “I’m a professional.”

“He’s also wearing an earpiece.”  Barton was eating a bag of chip, barefoot and in shorts, a pair of sunglasses perched on his head.  “Who else at this party has someone feeding them lines on a wire, huh?”  Barton shoved a fist full of chips into his face.  “Seriously, dude, time to go.” 

Tony made a face at the spray of chips, and then there was a sensation of weightless flight and he was Natalia and Natalia was him, and it was her words in his voice lying, making excuses, moving him out of the way.

Only once he was in the service lift, riding down to the basement, did he feel wholly himself again.  “Don’t do that.”

Natalia’s answer was cut off by the sound of an explosion, a jolt hard enough to send Tony stumbling into the elevator panel.  Tony shook his head, hard.  “Guys?”

The elevator was empty of his cluster…and then it wasn’t.  The kid was there, his tie askew, a thin bloody line on his throat smearing red on his white collar.  “Oh. Oh hi,” he said, Nigerian prince act gone.  “Shit, okay, this is bad, but this is less bad though, possibly,” he added, speaking fast as he waved his hand between Tony and himself.  

“Kid, breathe,” Tony snapped, fighting vertigo.  Maybe he hit his head harder than he thought on the wall.

Wanda’s hands were always slightly cool on his skin.  “Tony, you’re the one you should be breathing,” she murmured, running her fingers over his temple.

“Not you, him.” Wanda’s expression said it all.

"Is that the rest of your cluster?  Whatever,” the kid snapped.  “Priorities first. I’m Hardison, hate to Visit and run, but the bad guys with guns have arrived, so maybe, possibly, I can ask you to help a brother Sensate out?”


	3. Chapter 3

Tony was muttering to himself as he stripped wires with his teeth.  Having his Cluster in his head was  bad enough, but Visiting was just the cherry on top of the shit sandwich.  “Back in my day, a man’s head was his own,” he hissed as he twisted new connections together.

Wanda’s hand was gentle on his shoulder.  “Sucks to be you,” she told him solemnly.

Tony smiled with teeth at the destroyed board before him.  “Ready?” he asked.

Hardison was crouching down, and Tony had glimpses of overturned furniture.  “My girl is in place.  Count it, babe.”

Tony raised an eyebrow a second before he realized that comment wasn’t for him.  On one, he threw the breaker.

 * * *

Hardison ran, trusting his Cluster, feeling the switch as Parker and Eliot ran with him, ahead of him, as him. He leapt over fallen chairs, and made it to the doors just as Tony’s security hack kicked in and broke the seal.

“Oh, there goes my back,” he muttered as he pushed them apart with all his might, back and feet flat on either side until he’d worked open a gap wide enough to slip through.

“You trust this guy?” Eliot asked as Hardison sprinted down the long corridor that linked the two wings of this building.

“Dude,” Hardison panted.  “Tony freaking _Stark_  is a Sensate.  Hell yeah.”

“He’s government,” Parker pointed out, waiting for them at the corner.  “He could be working with the Cannibal.”

Hardison couldn’t explain _why_ he was so sure; luckily, being sensate meant never needing to have to find the words.

There was a split second silent conference.  It was Nate who made the call.  “Let’s finish this then.”

 * * *

Tony still wasn’t used to the way his world just _changed_ , leapfrogging him around the globe.  “So that’s the big deal then?” he asked, nodding at the manila folder laid on Hardison’s lap. “I mean, I know about ending parties with a bang, but that was something else.”

It had been three days, and even back in New York, Tony’s news feeds were full of headlines dissecting the explosions.

Hardison finally looked up, tired and smoke-stained and proud.  “No other way.  They don’t leave a digital footprint.  Paper only.  The BPO is thorough, and careful.”

Tony felt his Cluster pick up on his curiousity.  “BPO?”

Hardison nodded, and Tony again had the sense that he was intruding on a conversation he couldn’t hear. “Take a seat, man,” he said, patting stonework a thousand miles from where Tony knew he actually was.  “There’s a few things you need to know.”


End file.
